Raising the Avro Arrow in Lake Ontario

I haven’t been able to say much until now but I can finally talk about our current expedition in Lake Ontario. We’ve been searching for the lost Avro Arrow free flight models used for pre-production testing in the mid 1950s. See some of the media links below for info on the models and the history behind them.

Prior to heading out on this expedition we needed a highly portable ROV for ground truthing the sonar imagery being generated by our AUV. Due to limited infrastructure we couldn’t bring a work class ROV and we decided to take a chance on a BlueROV 2. It was low cost, highly portable and seemed ideal for the relatively shallow water work we were doing. If anyone was wondering if you can use a BlueROV for commercial work, well, you can and we have. Yes, there are things we plan on changing and features we’d like to add, but straight out of the box the BR2 is a great little work horse. We’ve been running the vehicle every other day for the last 5 weeks. The ROV video in the link below was captured using a GoPro externally mounted on the vehicle.

https://www.facebook.com/raisethearrow/videos/1440291282734577/

A little talk about the ROV.

I’ll try to put together a compilation video of our discoveries in a few weeks but I thought I’d share for those interested.

Media links about the project:

http://vocm.com/news/nl-tech-leading-search-for-piece-of-lost-canadian-history/

2 Likes

It sounds like you have an ESC giving a fault code in your first video ‘Raise the Arrow’. Did you notice one of the motors was not working?

Also this is awesome, and there’s interesting history behind this.

Good catch. That’s actually the leak alarm going off. We buggered a set of lights on a previous dive (sucked one of cables into a thruster). Water penetrated up the cut cable housing and pushed into the main enclosure. Given the importance of the dive and because we were aware of the rate of water penetration we went ahead with it. Luckily it resulted in no further water penetration and we got the video we were after New lights arrived today.

Ok, I’m confident that the sound heard just after the gopro goes into the housing is not the leak warning, but an ESC fault, the brownout code.

My business partner and I were the commercial divers that loaded the model into the yellow baskets and brought it up.

1 Like